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Osama Steals from Obama's Playbook
AP Photo; Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images
By lumping Obama in with Bush, bin Laden is borrowing from the new president’s own campaign strategy. But persuading fence-sitting potential jihadists that O. is another W. will be a challenge.
Osama bin Laden, among others, has his work cut out for him when he seeks to convince potential followers that Barack Obama and George W. Bush are birds of a proverbial feather.
“Obama has followed the footsteps of his predecessor in increasing animosity toward Muslims and increasing enemy fighters and establishing long-term wars,” Osama complained in an audio message released Wednesday. “Obama and his administration have planted new seeds to increase hatred and revenge from America. The number of those seeds is the same as the number of those harmed and displaced from Swat Valley and the tribal regions in North and South Waziristan and the number of their sympathizers.”
Obama’s name, face, and personal history offer him unmatched credibility for a Western leader to put a lie to their fanciful (and murderous) suggestions.
Far be it from your humble correspondent to try to gauge the appeal of this or that bin Laden accusation to the fence-sitting potential jihadist, but it strikes me that an American president who is fighting a war against an enemy that attacked us and murdered our civilians, as al Qaeda did, and is now increasing its strength along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, is by definition a more difficult target for hatred incitement than one who gratuitously invades a Muslim country that had nothing whatever to do with said attack.
What’s more, an awful lot of Muslims are themselves horrified by the specter of Taliban-style rule in their own countries and appreciate the efforts of an army that is seeking to prevent its spread throughout the region, whatever its reasons. Sore loser John Kerry blamed his 2004 loss to George W. Bush on the release of a bin Laden tape just days before the election. Thankfully, America is finally ready to say “goodbye” to all that.
For much of Wednesday, the screaming headline on the Drudge Report was “The Emergence of President Obama’s Muslim Roots.” Oddly enough, the foolishness of the headline was not Drudge’s foolishness; rather, it belonged to whomever chose to give that silly headline to a blog post by ABC’s Jake Tapper.
In fact, Obama has no “Muslim roots” beyond the fact that he grew up in a few Muslim countries. (His father, whom he barely knew, was, he says, “basically agnostic.”) The dude is a Christian who was raised by a Christians and attends Christian churches, one of which got him into a heap of trouble during the election campaign with the same people who on other days were convinced he was a secret Muslim.
You’d think that if America were to benefit anywhere on earth from its amazing accomplishment of not only electing a black man to be president, but a black man with the name “Barack Hussein Obama,” it would be in the Arab and Islamic world. And you’d be right. While Bush and Dick Cheney took the caricature of the “ugly American” to extremes undreamed of in most Middle Eastern imaginations, Obama is the anti-Bush, (and anti-Cheney) in almost every respect, beginning with the color of his skin, and ending with the tenor and substance of his words. As Tapper reports, in his April 6 address to the Turkish parliament, Obama noted that many “Americans have Muslims in their families or have lived in a Muslim majority country. I know, because I am one of them.” How un-Bush can you be?
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Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.
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Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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Jeff Madrick is a contributor to the New York Review of Books and a former economics columnist for the New York Times. He is editor of Challenge Magazine, visiting professor of humanities at Cooper Union, and senior fellow at the New School's Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. He is the author of Taking America, The End of Affluence (Random House) and The Case for Big Government.
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Eric Alterman is a professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College and a professor of journalism at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author, most recently, of Why We're Liberals: A Handbook for Restoring America's Important Ideals.
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Eric Alterman is a professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College and a professor of journalism at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author, most recently, of Why We're Liberals: A Handbook for Restoring America's Important Ideals.
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Eric Alterman is a professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College and a professor of journalism at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author, most recently, of Why We're Liberals: A Handbook for Restoring America's Important Ideals.
Bin laden is still free. Who would have guessed it.
Add that to the list of things Bush did not accomplish.
Besides lowering taxes for the rich I can't think of one thing Bush did accomplish.
According to many of the posts on this site, Osama is dead.
Bush lowered taxes for everyone, myself, as a member of the middle class included, but was a day late and a dollar short with his veto pen.
Osama is dead? really?.
Bush lowered your taxes a few pennies and then he charged your credit card for thousands...Heck of deal!.
Obama is actually going to engage the Muslim world, this will increase his approval abroad and will diminish Osama's. Bush was hated in the Muslim world, for good reason. He was a bumbling fool who has killed 100,000 Iraqi's for what?.
And we wonder why they hate us?.
I for one do not support or condone what most Muslim countries do but we cannot kill and bomb our way into making people change.
Eric... excellent!
Truly change we can believe in... now, the hard part begins... the large ship must change direction, or we shall collide with the rocks... but at least we have the right captain for the job!
And he spent trillions
Not accomplishing anything.
And trillions more are still being spent - same crap, another day. Just getting piled higher and deeper.
I guess he should have done nothing and let the country meltdown back to the bronze age?
Don't you wish you could write and comment and right the world? Or, do we like and love and need and are addicted to this organized confusion we live in?
I believe we as US citizens should be responsible to complete a US history class each year we own a drivers License or a bank account or are employed.
And, that same class must be taught by a proxy rigged with a portable personal polygraph device. World Theology as an academic not a forced religious doctrine. Computer and network engineering up to and including a CompTIA A certification. And a Federally sponsored 3 day trip to a random foreign country once every 3 years. I know I'm talkin' shit ...but hey... so is every one else on this site.
You do usually find people who waive flags yelling their country is the best in the world , are usually people who have never been anywhere else to know. Not always just usually.
The historical (and geographical) ignorance of even purportedly educated Americans is indeed astonishing. The problem is that history and geography are treated as incidental subjects to be taken as 'electives' at university. Most young adults are forced fed historical ambiguity and anti-history in public school to the point where they learn to hate the subject so it's no wonder those who do attend university treat these subjects with a certain disdain. This is intolerable since we do in fact live in an ever shrinking world engulfed by a globalized economy. Yet as far as I can tell, the focus in public school remains math and English. Granted, both of these subjects are important but frankly, anyone who can't find Afghanistan or North Korea on a map or doesn't understand the historical nature of Christian-Muslim conflict is ignorant. In a world as complex as the one we live in today, there can be no excuse for ignorance and ignorance is what we will continue to see until we change the public school curriculum
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Is this gibberish or what? I actually spent time reading it! Is this person stoned?
Well, nobody ever said Osama bin Laden is stupid.
Just wrong.
Killing women and children, unarmed civilians who cannot resist, is just plain wrong, no matter the cause, no matter the provocation.
Bin Laden said
His goal was to bankrupt the U.S.
He's not stupid at all.
So, Eric what exact token gesture would you have us do?
bin Laden finance comes from the sale of opium poppy. When we occupy the opium fields and purchase all of the raw opium from the farmers bin Laden will be out of business. Those who serve his cause also get a paycheck.
michael s levinson dot commie deserves your viz
Perhaps before Alterman gives us more clap trap about Obama's and W's differences he out to read this listing of their sameness:
( below excerpt from Femisex.com)
Mr. Obama, the man who says one thing with the absolutist's flare of a preacher, and then does exactly another with the politician's manipulative triangulation, has come down here on torture and rule of law: in Bush Land.
*O is keeping rendition alive and well. (On the stump, O spit at W's renditions.)
*O is keeping military commission trials open for business. (Yeah O spit at W's commissions on the stump.)
*O opened up classified torture memos for political purposes, then held back torture photo ops for the same reason. (Let the courts do the damage and Obama can claim a clean nose.)
*O finds nice sounding euphemisms to make unlawful detentions of enemy combatants sound more palatable-his most recent being "Prolonged Detention" as though a grade-school gum-chewer must stay an extra half hour after school.
*O understands these "prolonged detentions" caused W Supreme Court grief x 2, so O has decided to make up some new laws that will allow him to prolongedly {sic x2} detention those feisty may or may-not-be combatants.
*O is digging in on illegal wire-tapping and no-penalty to those communications companies who assist the government with said illegal wire-tapping shenanigans. (Now doesn't shenanigans sound much much better kiddies?)
*O has decided to not say War on Terror, because even as he does what W did, it sounds bad to say it like W did. (I can't recall the new O- term we are all instructed to use now, but let me know, will you.)
*O told us closing Guantanamo would be a piece of cake, then had Congress take him to the Little Boy's Room to remind him a Plan would be needed before they forked out a paltry 80 million to close things up. (Too BAD Congress didn't do the same before giving Obama 634 Billion to fixeruper health care WithOut a plan!)
*O is fighting against habeas corpus for detainees at Bagram prison in Afghanistan-even those captured, say in Aruba, and flown to Bagram for detention. A federal court just ruled that Bagram prisoners captured in places Other than Afghanistan have habeas corpus rights-O says na-ah and is fighting the ruling.
And......
....in case you don't remember...on the stump Obama loved habeas corpus for all, and condemned John McCain for his opposition to habeas corpus for all.
*O has decided that it will be a great plan to infuse our prisons with enemy combatants.
(More on this to come this week!)
When Mr. Obama found out Big Bad Cheney was giving a speech, Obama rushed to go first, talking very nicely about the Rule of Law, restoring it and hoping the folks in America won't notice he's simply doing Bush, Obama Style.
As a matter of fact, as I thought about all O's newfound love for W's processes, I recalled something I read last February in the New Yorker. In an item titled "The Hard Cases" by Jane Mayer, a man I have little use for, said something very prescient when he was interviewed at the time of O's Inauguration. Mr. John Ashcroft said, that:
in the end, President Obama's approach to handling terror suspects would closely mirror his own: "How will he be different? The main difference is going to be that he spells his name 'O-b-a-m-a,' not 'B-u-s-h.' "
link: O finds his Inner W:
http://www.femisex.com/content/o-finds-his-inner-w%E2%80%94torturous-tal l-tales-o-stump
sadie101.
The earth is also flat, Bush said so.....
Sorry, your guy failed, step aside now.,...
MY guy? Bush did not get my vote once or twice or any time. What is sad is that you (and progressive2 below) fail to understand that Obama is simply Bush redux on terrorist issues. AGHNMM see the above list!
Perhaps you think that anyone who questions Obama's failures to undo Bush on these issues is hmmm, shall we say: unpatriotic?
what part of Obama = Bush on terror policies is being pro Bush?
I never voted for Bush and am only pointing out what the Left (aside from Greenwald on Salon) is working so hard to ignore:
That Obama has embraced Bush on almost all his policies towards detainees. The major difference btw Bush and Obama on this issue is that there is NO major difference. READ the post!
nice try sadie maybe next time do it without putting words in my mouth?
Score one for projection.
Oh btw my lower post was directed at Carole, of course if the shoe fits you can have it.
Sighs. Nothing more pathetic then a Bush Apologist.
Don't forget that mission accomplished thing lol.
What did you expect Osama to say? The guy is a psychopath. He hates all Muslims- except for his pure Wahabi sick puppy criminal following- let alone Christians (in his view, all Shiite Muslims are heathens that should be slaughtered; all 200 million of them, who do you, think is killing women and children in Iraq?) Did we expect him to like the president of the USA?
It is not about personalities. It is about achieving goals.
You know, once the US currency is no longer the main oil/currency, the US economy could be in serious trouble, of course it already is in serious trouble, which is why some countries might not want to use the USD as the oil/currency for ever.
And if Bin Laden's goal was to bankrupt the US it looks to me like he might succeed.
We are playing a cat and mouse game and it is wasting all kinds of money and resources, we might not agree with that, but I think Bin Laden does. I think Bin Laden's objective is clearer than ours. And that is very scarry. The good news is, Obama is much cuter and has a much nicer personality.
Wasn't that partly what the Iraq war was about, Saddam wanting to use Euros as the currency for their oil for food program? Saddam may have won the war too, in the long run even though, I must admit Bush is cuter than Saddam.
I think we are missing another point, with all that reward money, for Saddam, you think if he was dead, someone would send his body to whoever you send bodies too, for the reward money.
I suspect he is still alive.
I meant Osama not Saddam.
This writer makes the same mistake as President Obama. He assumes that potential jihadists are rational. They are not. The hatred that consumes them is for Jews. Americans are second in line. They hate America because of its support for Israel and that hatred existed long before Bush 2 took office. It is not confined to Jihadists but is shared by many "moderate" Muslims.
Now that they know Obama will not protect Israel, it will be open slather. His acknowledgement of the terrorist organization Hamas means defacto support for Iran, which finances it.
Iran has promised to wipe Israel from the face of the earth. Remember that Ahmadinejad said he wants all the Jews to go to Israel because he can kill them more easily in one place.
Obama's soaring rhetoric only slightly masks his true message to Muslims, both jihadist and others, which is one of appeasement.
By criticizing Israel, apologizing for the US "overrreaction" to 9/11 and refusing to acknowledge the real terrorist threat from fanatical Muslims, Obama sends a message of weakness. Do not think the hostile Muslim world will not act on it.
Thank you.
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